Cosmic radiation includes high-energy atomic particles that produce neutrons upon collision with atoms in the Earth's atmosphere. When these neutrons strike an integrated circuit device, the secondary spallation products from the neutrons colliding with a silicon or other atom in the device creates a trail of hole and electron pairs in the substrate of the integrated circuit. A circuit node of the integrated circuit can collect the holes or the electrons. If a storage node collects enough charge from the holes or from the electrons, the collected charge can corrupt the value stored by the storage node. This corruption of a storage node is referred to as a “soft error,” because the integrated circuit may operate properly after a reset and/or correction of the corrupted value.
Various techniques permit mitigation of soft errors. However, these techniques are difficult and time consuming to implement, and these techniques are often especially difficult and time consuming to implement without seriously impacting system functionality. In addition, many soft errors are benign because the integrated circuit does not operate improperly after these soft errors. However, existing techniques are extremely inaccurate in estimating benign soft errors. Thus, to ensure a targeted level of reliability, soft error mitigation may needlessly mitigate many benign soft errors.